Until I started researching for my next novel, A Dangerous Duet (originally "The Piano Girl of Soho"), I really knew very little about music halls except that they came into being in the mid-1800s as one of several entertainment venues in London. As usual, when I started rooting around, I discovered all kinds of interesting facts about the lawsuits, scandals, fires, architecture, ongoing concerns about alcohol and prostitution, associations with crime, relationships between music hall proprietors and the Metropolitan Police, run-ins with the local magistrates, and turf wars with theaters, many of which elements slide quite nicely into a mystery novel. I was lucky enough in 2012 to travel to London, where Wilton's Music Hall, established in 1858, still stands--and still stages award-winning performances. As I prowled around the lower level, with the brick walls and irregular floors, and gazed through the window at the back of the theater, I could picture my heroine Nell at a piano alcove near stage right; I could imagine the boisterous crowds and the costumed performers; and my fictional music hall, The Octavian, suddenly had color and texture and shape.

The earliest music halls of the 1850s were really outgrowths of existing pubs, which added entertainment of some kind to the area where people could consume alcohol. These “saloons” morphed into the music halls that sprang up in many industrial areas—Leeds, Manchester, Bolton, and of course London. By 1866, London had between two and three hundred small music halls and about thirty large ones that would hold between 1,500 and 3,500 guests. So by the time of my novel (1875), the music hall culture was very well established.

Although the Victorian music hall was quite beautifully decorated, until the 1890s, audiences were primarily drawn from the working class and lower-middle class. Men, women, young, old, and families all attended, although men made up the large part of most audiences, and some shows were geared toward particular groups. The music hall was a rowdy place, where the sexes came in close proximity, where people could enjoy both alcohol and entertainment, and where audiences and the performers often interacted, breaking the “fourth wall” at the edge of the stage. The music hall programme included rousing songs, dramatic acts, musicians, magicians, animal acts, jugglers, political comedy, singers, toffs, mimes, trampoline and trapeze acts, male and female impersonators, and strongmen. The songs and performances tended to be sensational, bawdy, and full of spectacles including outrageous costumes; and they often made a mockery of the middle-class values of temperance, decorum, and purity that the Reform Societies sought to instill among the lower classes. The music halls promoted what some critics call “counter-cultural values”: ribaldry, bawdiness, hedonism, sensuality, the enjoyment of alcohol, the mockery of authority, the representation of marriage as a tragi-comic farce, and the equality of the sexes in work, leisure, and sexual desire. In its bold energy, humor, and frank commentary about the world, a music hall performance often had more in common with "Saturday Night Live" than an elaborately staged classic Broadway show.

There were significant differences between the music halls of London and those in outlying manufacturing areas such as Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow. For example, in the manufacturing areas where women were employed, their presence in music halls was tolerated; a woman could spend her wages on entertainment if she chose. In London, it was often assumed that a woman who was not escorted by a man was a prostitute. In other cities, magistrates were chiefly concerned with the role the music halls played in alcohol consumption and the deterioration of morals. In London, local magistrates focused their attention on those halls that allowed prostitutes and “promiscuous dancing.”

However, the magistrates and the Metropolitan Police were on opposing sides of this issue; and the Police, under Sir Richard Mayne until 1868, were answerable to the Home Office, not the magistrates. Partly because the Police were understaffed, they were not particularly concerned about prostitutes, so long as they kept a low profile. Some music hall proprietors even developed friendly relationships with the Police, holding benefit shows for the support of police orphans, and sending wine to police at Christmas. (In my novel, the music-hall owner Mr. Drummond and the police have a relationship that far surpasses this, but it began in these innocuous ways.)

Another conflict surrounding the halls concerned which acts were to be permitted in them. The Theatres Act of 1843 stated that “every Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, Opera, Burlett, Interlude, Melodrama, Pantomime, or other entertainment of the state, or any part thereof” fell under their domain and was licensed as such. But the music-hall license allowed for “public dancing, music, or other public entertainment of the like kind.” The overlap led to arguments in law courts beginning in the 1860s, with the theaters insisting that if they weren’t allowed to retain the rights to both short and long dramatic performances, they would have nothing to offer that the music halls didn’t, and they might as well shut their doors. In 1892, the Select Committee on Theaters and Places of Entertainment gathered evidence from people on both sides of the argument, after which they recommended that “sketches” be limited to 40 minutes and 6 players, so as to distinguish them from plays. But no law was forthcoming until 1912.

As a place where social boundaries were crossed, where irony, double-entendre, farce, and comedy presided, and where the concerns of the working-classes provide the topics and themes of many performances, the music hall provided a space in which the working class could develop their own class identity, their own core of common knowledge and brand of humor, and self-confidence. As such, the music hall was part of the network of local organizations and community-based cultural institutions, such as parishes, neighborhoods, cooperatives, from which the Labour Party of the 1890s sprang. So it occupies an important place in any discussion of late 19th-century notions of class, community, and politics.

A short list of the laws influencing the music halls and theaters:1752 Disorderly Houses Act for “preventing Thefts and Robberies, and for Regulating Places of Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping disorderly houses.”1843 Theatres Act1868 Magistrates drawn up their own safety provisions, but then in1878 Metropolitan Building Acts Amendment Act made safety provisions for public buildings; implemented by Metropolitan Board of Works and the Middlesex Magistrates1879 Children’s Dangerous Performances Act1888 Local Government Act of 1888, which shifted the power to craft policy about music-hall licensing from Middlesex magistrates to the newly-formed central government.

My gratitude to Jon Freeman, the building manager of Wilton’s Music Hall in Graces Alley, London in 2012, for letting me prowl around the last existing Victorian music hall, take photographs, and ask him questions. For further information about Wilton's current show schedule and an excellent record of the hall's history, see www.wiltons.org.uk.

What strikes me about the openings of books--particularly historical fiction, I think--is how in just a few lines, they often gesture to the large themes or to the turning points of novels. These openings are from some of my favorites.

10 openings from 10 historical novels. It’s like name that tune. Only more fun.

(1) The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs, and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.

(2) A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.

(3) I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a world I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.

(4) Lieutenant William Bush came on board H.M.S. Renown as she lay at anchor in the Hamoaze and reported himself to the officer of the watch, who was a tall and rather gangling individual with hollow cheeks and a melancholy cast of countenance, whose uniform looked as if it had been put on in the dark and not readjusted since.

(5) [The heroine] was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tartleton twins were.

(6) The last time I saw Laurent Jammet, he was in Scott’s store with a dead wolf over his shoulder.

(7) He’s writing when they come for him. He’s sitting at his metal desk, bent over a yellow legal pad, talking to himself, and to her—as always, to her. So he doesn’t notice them standing at his door. Until they run their batons along the bars.

(8) In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.

(9) I used to love this season. The wood stacked by the door, the tang of its sap still speaking of forest. The hay made, all golden in the low afternoon light. The rumble of apples tumbling into the cellar bins. Smells and sights and sounds that said this year would be all right: there’d be food and warmth for the babies by the time the snows came.

(10) The sun poked out briefly, evidence of a universe above them, of watchful things—planets and stars and vast galaxies of infinite knowledge—and just as suddenly it retreated behind the clouds. The doctor passed only two other autos during the fifteen-minute drive, saw but a lone pedestrian even though it was noon on Sunday, a time when people normally would be returning home from church, visiting with friends and family. The flu had been in Timber Falls for three weeks now, by the doctor’s best estimation, and nearly all traffic on the streets had vanished.

I love best the historical novels that have the feel of the real, and often they describe or represent the objects of daily life, mundane to the characters but unfamiliar to us. A few weeks ago my friend Wendy, who is madly talented at hunting up curious things in thrift stores, gave me this piece of crockery. (The pen is for scale.) She wasn't sure what it was, she said, but with the brush of gold, and the maker’s mark (“F. Winkle & Co. Byron England”) on the inside, it looked like it came straight out of my book, set in Victorian England, so she wanted me to have it. Maybe it was a serving dish, meant for soup or a stew, she ventured. That night my mother-in-law walked in to my kitchen, saw it on the counter, and gasped: "My! What a beautiful chamber pot!"

I have put it in my office, along with a few other items: 19th-century medical books, a hatpin from the 1860s, a cast-iron train engine. Much like the “portkeys” in Harry Potter books—such as the old boot that can transport half a dozen people from a field in England to the World Cup Quidditch match—these objects connect me to my alternate universe. I found myself curious and began to ask my writer friends (on the FB Historical Novel Society page and elsewhere) if they too have an historic object like this that feels like a portkey to their period. I received back a resounding, “Yes!” and some wonderful pictures. Farthings, washboards, a napkin ring from the deck of a WWI naval ship, vanity sets, chess pieces, furniture, parasols; the list went on and on. (A side note: one member told me that chamber pots were also known as “thunder mugs” by pioneers in the Northwest. Isn’t that the best moniker?)

By chance, I just finished Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, which I can already tell will be in my top ten books for the year. Near the end of the book, Michael meets a woman named Sally who knew his grandfather toward the end of his life, after he had been diagnosed with cancer. She attends a book reading in Florida, and Michael and she go out to dinner. He reaches over to light her cigarette with a silver lighter his grandfather was given during WWII by a friend named Aughenbaugh.

“That lighter,” [Sally said.]“There was a story behind it,” [Michael replied].“I’m sure. All of his stories were stuck behind something.”

Maybe that is partly why I like the somethings—because they suggest that there is always a story stuck behind them. But it’s also more than that. If I am going to try to imagine a Victorian woman’s life, I like to think I can inch just a bit closer by putting my hands in the same place hers were—as if I could, by touching that handle and hefting the porcelain weight of it, feel what she felt, with both her fingertips and her heart.

If you have a "portkey" to your period that you'd like to share, please post a picture and/or your story below, in comments. I'd love to see!